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The Future of business. Future of business, future of business.

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It's more global and more decentralised, making sure that enterprises are a lot more responsible.

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Smart cities, more collaboration. Consumer driven productivity.

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Environmental and social responsibility. Global human centred.

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Purposeful Individualised Automation. Big Data.

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Climate Change. Space Exploration. Renewable Energy.

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Information Security. Exciting and digital. Hello and welcome to the Future of Business Podcast.

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I'm your host, Alison McArthur. Today we bring you the second in our two part series on the future of business in Africa.

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In our last episode, you heard from leaders in the private and public sectors about the African Continental Free Trade Agreement.

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Today, we'll bring you more on the challenges and opportunities facing the continent as governments consider a more unified future.

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First, we'll hear from serial entrepreneur Erik Hersman about how technology and innovation can play a role.

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My name is Erik Hersman. I'm the CEO of BRIC. So I don't look or sound like it.

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I did grow up in East Africa, in Sudan and Kenya, and then went to the U.S. for university and then came back to Kenya with my first business.

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And so I've been deep in the technology sector and in Kenya for a while with, you know, the founding of Ushahidi, the Ihub, a brick savannah fund.

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Gearbox, a number of different initiatives. And all of those initiatives are really about how do we get the foundations

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set so that we can have more tech companies doing everything from hardware,

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you know, design, engineering all the way through to just large scale software.

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Start-ups. So I'm very tech oriented, but and today and today's work that I do with Break, it's really about connectivity.

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I really think a lot about that. Mm hmm. So the Ihub is an innovation centre for the tech community.

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How important do you think collaboration is in driving innovation in the West?

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So, I mean, you teed that question up for me perfectly because I think that collaboration and connectivity is actually

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the glue for any any not even tech ecosystem but business ecosystem to really accelerate and catalyse.

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So when we were building the AI Hub back in 2010, one of the big ideas is saying, hey, listen, we you know, of course, technology is already starting.

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It's already happening here. Right. There's engineers building things.

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But how do we take what's going to happen already over the next five years and accelerate to three?

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Right. So we just move faster. And the way you do that is you get people connected. You get ideas having babies with each other, right?

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With people talking with each other.

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You try and just make those spaces available to them so that they can they can talk and and you never know what's going to happen.

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So the serendipity of never knowing who you're going to run into,

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but finding valuable links all the time is where these tech hubs really become invaluable.

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Think of them as a community commons. Right. That everybody's welcome to for that community.

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And you have a much better understanding of what a tech hub should be. And it seems, you know, well,

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certainly looking from the outside in that Africa is a continent of entrepreneurs in the sense that you just see people building businesses on,

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you know, from a tiny scale to a larger scale. Have you experienced that from living there?

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And how important is this mindset? Yeah. So I mean, I think it's a different level across different countries.

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But, you know, there's a there's a great term that was coined for African entrepreneurs,

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which is parallel entrepreneurs, where people are always running multiple businesses.

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Everybody has a side hustle. Right. Even the you know, the permanent secretary has a side hustle.

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Right. So everybody has something that they're doing. And I think that's kind of it's in the DNA of the entrepreneurism in the continent.

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And and because of that, it's done because of de-risking. Right.

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So if you have a couple of things going, if something goes south on one of them, you can at least have other revenue coming in from other streams.

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So the reason why is interesting, but it also it also means that, yeah, we have a great entrepreneurial culture across many of the countries.

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You know, sometimes they're, they're focussed on really small businesses like micro kind of businesses, but, you know, at least it's there.

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And, you know, and this is you know, this is industriousness and ingenuity born of necessity.

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This is, you know, I need to earn my bread. I need to be able pay school fees.

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It's not just because I want to do something cool or I want to be an entrepreneur to be my own boss.

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It's like now this is the only option. Right. And I think that can be valuable, too.

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Yeah, absolutely. So what do you see as Africa's competitive advantage in terms of driving forward innovation?

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It's obviously a very young country and people are more tech savvy.

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So do you think that's that's an advantage, you know?

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Yeah, I do think that when you have the youth bulge like we have, it's it's interesting.

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You know, I was looking at some numbers recently and, you know, there's there's no there's, you know,

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causation and correlation are not aligned here, but they're funny because the numbers are about the same.

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So we have, you know, 1.2, 1.3 billion people on the continent.

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Right. 450 of which are connected to the Internet, which means about 800,000 or not.

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If you look at those who are under the age of 25, it's about the same number, 800, 800 that I'm sorry, 800 million.

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Right. And you sort of say, wow, that's a really interesting number. So the youth bulge is real.

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The technology access is still a little lopsided, but it's changing rapidly.

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So, you know, I think that the competitive advantage is going to come from how.

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We've learned to apply technology across multiple businesses.

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So it's a cross-cutting kind of thing, right across multiple businesses to be accessible by these youth.

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Right. Because so in our network in Kenya, in Rwanda, we have 500,000 monthly active users, 5 million sessions a month.

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It's growing is growing rapidly. The first thing people want to do when they get access to the Internet is, you know, WhatsApp.

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So comes with family and friends. The second thing they want to do is entertainment.

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You know, YouTube is the primary source. And the third thing is look for jobs and in ways they can do commerce on their own.

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Right. And so I think the youth of the continent getting access to that,

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having a low friction way to get into the Internet and be able to do things like that will have a massive effect across the across the board.

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And obviously,

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there's been a lot of talk around sort of obviously how microfinance will impact investing as a way to facilitate economic development in Africa.

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I think on a global scale, people are very aware of the economic potential of the continent.

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And how important do you think it is to develop new innovative financing models to reach different businesses?

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Well, I think it's always valuable to do that. It's always I mean, I think Africa is probably one of the better places to to try some new stuff.

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I think it's a great because it's so hard to do some things. It's actually a really great testing grounds for new things.

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One of the things that we didn't talk about earlier,

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but I think is really important as you talk about competitive advantage is actually lack of regulation.

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Mm hmm. Like this overregulation you get in the West prohibits some innovation to happen.

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Right. And I think the the lack of of of overregulation can be a competitive advantage in African countries.

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So you can try new businesses and new business models, you know,

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and hopefully try something that will work at a large scale across multiple countries.

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Next, we spoke with Kola Adesina, group managing director at Sahara Group,

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a multinational energy and infrastructure conglomerate operating in over 38 countries on the global stage.

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What do you see as Africa's position in the world in the future?

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I if there is anything that I'm but sentimentally attached to each time I see it and I see it almost every day of my life is the map of Africa.

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If you look at the map of Africa tilted the other way, it looks like a gun.

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And if you are the Don, you know what that means?

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It means that everything in terms of greatness and opportunity are here for the world to enjoy.

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China is rapidly investing in Africa and forging new relationships not because of anything, but because of the market.

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China is shrinking because of their population. Control methods underestimate them, which is not making them grow as much as they should.

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But Africa is too green. We're still exploding by way of population, so the market will remain readily there.

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And because we are still at the infancy stage of development,

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it invariably means that the opportunity is available for companies with products and services that can help the coast of Africa.

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For us to truly grow and identify with the world in terms of the enablers of success that the rest of the world has.

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The products have been manufactured in Japan, so they end up in Africa.

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Products been actually in Germany, it's in Africa.

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So if Africa is a major market, is a place for you to sell your commodity, that's the place to be.

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Africa has value to the rest of the world in terms of the market size, equally in terms of education.

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A lot of Africans travel abroad to Oxford, Cambridge, understand them to acquire knowledge.

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So invariably, we are equally spreading our tentacles around to acquire the knowledge to this economy require.

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Africa is the place to be. Absolutely. So I think.

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So you've been involved in acting as a mentor to young entrepreneurs.

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Why do you think it's so important to involve young people in business? Well, if you look at the demographics of Africa today,

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you'll see that the population of the youth population is growing almost twice as much in the last 20 years.

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Good quality health care is helping, so people are seeing a life.

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So if we are going to die, we're going to we're not going to live forever.

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We need to hand over the baton to somebody. And we are deliberately crafting policies to help that next generation acquire

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the skill sets and competencies needed to run the system better than we met it.

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The Charter of Competition will continuously remain making things better, making it cheaper and draining faster.

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This generation has learnt the microwave concept of knowledge and I'm sure that they will act on that to make our future better than it is today.

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So it makes sense for me to share what I know with the younger generation and learn from

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them as well whilst I'm still alive so that I can be better than what I was 10 minutes ago.

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So it's possible to be at the learning phase both ways. I think that's a really nice point to end on.

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The same is that Mr. Adesina was a pleasure to talk with you. My pleasure. Thank you.

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Thank you. Thank you so much. Before we go, we'd like to bring you the second part of our interview with Dr. Viera Sunway,

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Executive Secretary for the UN Economic Commission for Africa.

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In her remarks at this year's Oxford Business Forum Africa,

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Dr. Sunway spoke about the important role that women must play in building a better Africa and a better world.

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Some way was the first woman to hold her position at the United Nations and was previously

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listed by the Africa Business Review as one of the top ten female business leaders in Africa.

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We asked Dr. Sunway why it's important for women to seek senior positions on the world stage.

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There have been a lot of studies that show that when you have women in leadership,

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the policies that are put in place are more favourable for equitable and sustainable development.

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So I think that is the first thing is that you can help ensure that, you know, there's more gender parity.

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And secondly, it's just the visibility. I think the world, and particularly our continent, still needs women to be visible so that, you know,

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you can give the younger girls that coming up, the encouragement and the ability to think that they, too, can do it.

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And finally, I think we have seen across the world that when women are in organisations,

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the organisations are more profitable, they are more innovative.

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And so my sense is that hopefully that we can bring all this to bear on our institutions.

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I must say that the Secretary-General of the United Nations has already reached

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parity at the sort of senior level that we have 5050 now with the women,

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and we are trying to ensure that. So we are proud as the UN to be one of the institutions that has parity.

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But it's once you have parity at the top levels because what we see with with with sort of gender empowerment is the fact that, you know,

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you need to build a bench, you must build a bench because otherwise then with two if two people leave, then you go from 50% to 30% very quickly.

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So you really need to build a bench and you can sort of continue to to to ensure that people come.

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And that starts with mentoring and creating and ensuring that there is more women at every level of the system that can,

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you know, ensure and that are very performing. And, you know, as women, we work twice as hard and we continue to work twice as hard.

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By the time we get to work, we've done, you know, three jobs already now, you know?

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So I think that it's the visibility, it's the privilege to be able to then mentor a few more so that we have a lot more that come up as we of.

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Yeah, for me it was it was really inspiring to see you on stage.

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I know for a lot of women, the audience, they would have felt exactly the same thing.

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What advice would you give to women who want to make a change and want to make their voices heard on a on a higher level,

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be persistent and work really hard, be extremely prepared.

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Because, you know, we we always have to sort of own the stage.

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We are never given the stage. And you can't earn it if you're not prepared.

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You can't earn it. If you're not resilient, you may not get it the first time, but you have to keep trying.

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If you believe in the idea, then you know you must continue with it because the minute you decide that you're going to stop believing in the idea,

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you can not only fail yourself, but you fail all the other women that are behind you and feel it.

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You know, believing and not succeeding the first time just requires you to become even stronger,

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even more sturdy, and to go back and work a little bit harder.

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I think there is proof. There is enough proof now that working sufficiently hard, you know, harder than maybe the rest,

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but that should not be a cause for completely should be a cause for saying, you know, I can do this and I can get further.

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So really ensuring that you can work but look around you bring other people along with you as you do that and then, you know,

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be grateful for the support that you have from friends and family and and, you know,

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mentors and managers and, you know, good leaders that you have ahead of you.

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Doctor, some way. Thank you very much for joining us. That's very inspirational.

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Thank you. Thank you for having me. And thank you for joining us this week.

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We hope you've enjoyed our series on the future of Africa and that you'll join us in two weeks.

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Time for another exciting episode of the Future of Business podcast.

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If you haven't already, please subscribe and rate us. And as always, if you have any thoughts in the podcast, you can email us at SBS Podcast.

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